Sri Aurobindo came to Me

CHAPTER V

The Trials

When the Madras train deposited me at the desolate station of Pondicherry on that unforgettable morning in November, 1928, Sri Aurobindo's disciples in his Ashram numbered about 80. Now, in 1951, we are a little over 800. I do not remember what was the proportion of women among us in those days but there were hardly any children. So, our Ashram courtyard basked in a delectable silence which receded progressively as the inmates increased and imported more and more children who had to be accepted for their parents' sakes.

Still "the noiseless tenor of our lives" was not marred appreciably till after 1940, or, maybe, even later. Before that we were a serious crew in all conscience, the bulk as impeccably grave and dignified as one could wish. But even when I looked askance at such sombre acolytes, my disapproval of their deportment was prompted by and large by my sheer inability to sympathise with their temperaments — and that also because I have seen the harm slogans do when one is not on one's guard: they lull one too often, alas, with the pathetic delusion that quoting wisdom is nearly as good as growing into it. (Sri Aurobindo wrote to me once: "Perhaps X had come to believe it himself— that he had become a superman — as George IV came to believe that he had won the battle of Waterloo by dint of repeatedly saying so ".) But in return I will willingly wish them the joy of gloating over my deep discomfiture by furnishing them with evidence of Gurudev's disapproval of my admiration for the Russellian type of rationalism, as, for example, when he wrote to me soon after I came to the Ashram:*

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* I invited his comment on Russell's remark in his 'Conquest of Happiness':

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"Dilip, I have not forgotten Russell, but I have neglected him first, for want of time; second, because for the moment I have mislaid your letter; third, because of lack of understanding on my part. What is the meaning of his 'taking interest in external things for their own sakes?' And what is an 'introvert'? Both these problems baffle me.

"The word 'introvert' has come into existence only recently and sounds like a companion of 'pervert'. Literally, it means one who is turned inwards. The Upanishad speaks of the doors of the senses that are turned outwards, absorbing man in external things ('for their own sakes', I suppose?) and of the rare man among a million who turns his vision inwards and sees the Self. Is that man an introvert? And is Russell's ideal man 'interested in externals for their own sakes' — a Ramaswami the chef, or Joseph, the chauffeur, for instance — homo extemalis Russellius, an extrovert? Or is an introvert one who has an inner life stronger than his external one — the poet, the musician, the artist? Was Beethoven in his deafness bringing out music from within an introvert? Or does it mean one who measures external things by an inner standard and is interested in them not 'for their own sakes' but for their value to the soul's self-development, its psychic, religious, ethical or other self-expression? Are Tolstoy and Gandhi examples of introverts? Or, in another field — Goethe? Or does it mean one who cares for external things only as they touch his own mind or else concern his ego? But that I suppose would include 999,999 men out of every million.

"What are external things? Russell is a mathematician. Are mathematical formulae external things, even though they exist here only in the World-mind and the mind of Man? If not, is Russell, as mathematician, an introvert? Again, Yajnavalkya says that one loves the wife not for the sake of the wife, but for the Self's sake, and so with other objects of interest and desire —

________________________

"We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes upon the emptiness within."

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whether the self be the inner Self or the ego. In Yoga it is the valuing of external things in terms of the desires of the ego that is discouraged — their only value is their value in the manifestation of the Divine. Who desires external things 'for their own sakes' and not for some value to the conscious being? Even Cheloo, the day-labourer, is not interested in a four-anna piece for its own sake, but for some vital satisfaction it can bring him; even with the hoarding miser it is the same — it is his vital beings' passion for possession that he satisfies, and that is something not external but internal, part of his inner make-up, the unseen personality that moves inside behind the veil of the body.

"What is then meant by Russell's 'for their own sakes'? If you enlighten me on these points, I may still make an effort to comment on his mahavakya (great dictum).

"More important is his wonderful phrase about the 'emptiness within'! On that at least I hope to make a comment one day or another."

The above letter meant much to me even though I could not accept to be so easily knocked out —in the very first round. I wrote back to him quoting from a book of Lytton Strachey about some idols in a potter's shop. "One fine morning," I wrote, "the potter discovered, to his utter amazement, that the lesser :idols had all been hurled to the ground and blown to smithereens by the biggest which alone grandly survived. But in this case, Guru, you have not achieved nearly as complete a victory since; one has at least escaped annihilation: Bertrand Russell. And he still survives because, unlike many far-famed Yogis, he talks sense (and not childish rubbish) when adjudicating e.g. on the place of mind in life or of marriage in human relationship. Fortunately for us, Guru, you happen to be an exception among the Yogis but all the same let me humbly submit it as a possibility that maybe you can hold your own against men of Russell's calibre not so much because of your spiritual stature as because of your massive mind, intellectual clarity and unimpeachable character. So, I hope you will please allow me to doubt if you could have duelled thus with Russell in his own den and, in the end,

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bearded him had you been a spiritual giant but a mental dwarf. Also, I venture to suggest that you are doing a grave injustice to your own human equipment — your erudition, character, mental perspicacity etc. which have stood you here in good stead." Also I made bold to point out to him how much he had in common with the great philosopher and thinker, his butt, quoting among other things from the latter's famous and inspiring 'Free Man's Worship': "To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation... by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hope, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right; it is the very gate of wisdom."

And I went on to add:

"You must bear with me, Guru, if I quote something again from Russell — not for your benefit but mine: you see, I feel guilty, because I have not stressed so far, as I should have, that there is a deeper side — of vision — to his nature. So I have translated into Bengali verse a fairly long passage from his 'Free Man's Worship' which will speak for itself. Here is the passage:

"In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose waves we toss for a brief hour. From the great night without, a chill blast breaks

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in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of dark ness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence."

He wrote back: "Your translation is admirable. I did not know that the mathematician was also a poet." Then he went on to add, possibly a trifle aroused:

"About Russell — I have never disputed his abilities car his character; I am concerned only with his opinions and there too only with those opinions which touch upon my province — that of spiritual Truth. In all religions, the most narrow and stupid even, and in all non-religions also, there are great minds, .great men, fine characters. I know little about Russell, but I never dreamed of disputing the greatness of Lenin, for instance, merely because he was an atheist — nobody would, unless he were an imbecile. But the greatness of Lenin does not debar me from refusing assent to the credal dogmas of Bolshevism, and the beauty of character of an atheist does not prove that spirituality is a lie of the imagination and that there is no Divine. I might add that if you can find the utterances of famous Yogis childish when they talk of marriage or on other matters, I cannot be blamed for finding the ideas of Russell about spiritual experience, of which he knows nothing, very much wanting in light and substance. You have not named the Yogis in question and till you do, I am afraid I shall cherish a suspicion about either the height or the breadth of their spiritual experience. But off that hereafter, when I get a chance of an hour or two to write on it."

Later when I began to see various colours etc., he wrote to me in answer to my question whether it could be auto-suggestion, or hallucination:

'No, it was neither optical illusion nor hallucination nor coincidence (chromatic) nor auto-suggestion nor any of the other ponderous and vacant polysyllables by which physical science

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tries to explain away or rather avoid explaining the (scientifically) inexplicable. In these matters the scientist is always doing what he is always blaming the layman for, when the latter lays down the law on things about which he is profoundly ignorant without investigation or experiment, without ascertained knowledge simply by evolving a theory or an a priori idea out of his own mind and plastering it as a label on the unexplained phenomena."

And then he went on to add, incidentally having a fling at the Russellian outlook:

"As for what showed itself to you, it was not a mere curious phenomenon, not even merely a symbolic colour, but things that have a considerable importance.... That this should be the first thing shown when the power of vision broke through its state of latency is very significant; it proves that you are in contact, the touch is already there is your inner being and that His force of presence and protection is already around you or over you as an environing influence.

"Develop this power of that inner sense and all that it brings you. These first seeings are only an outer fringe — behind it all lie whole worlds of experience which fill what seems to the natural man the gap (your Russell's inner void) between the earth-consciousness and the Eternal and Infinite."

Lastly, he wrote in a post-script: "I remember when I first began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open eye), a scientific friend of mine began to talk of after-images — 'these are only after-images!' I asked whether after-images remained before the eye for two minutes at a time — he said, 'no', to his knowledge 'only for a few seconds.' I also asked him whether one could get after-images of things not around one or even existing upon earth since they had other shapes, another character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements and values — he could not reply in the affirmative. That is how these so called scientific explanations break down as soon as you pull them out of their cloud land of mental theory and face them with the actual phenomena they pretend to decipher."

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In another letter he wrote commenting on an experience of mine: " I repeat what I have said before — though your physical mind does not yet believe — that these experiences show at once that your inner being is a Yogi capable of trance, ecstasy, intensest bhakti, fully aware of Yoga and Yogic consciousness and showing himself the very moment you get inside yourself even as the outer man is very much the other way round — modernised, externalised, vigorously outward vital and knowing nothing of Yoga or the world of inner experience. I could see at once when I saw you that there was this inner Yogi and your former experiences here were quite convincing to anyone who knows anything at all about these things. When there is this inner Yogi inside, the coming to the way of Yoga is sure and not even the most externalised surface consciousness — (not even a regular homo Russellins outside, and you are not that — only a little Russellicatus on the surface) — can prevent final success in the Yoga. But the tussle between the inward and outward man can create a lot of trouble because the inward man pushes towards the Divine and will not let go and the outward man regrets, repines, pulls back, asks what is this shadowy thing to which he is being brought, this unknown, this (to him) far-off Ineffable. That, and not merely food or society, is the genesis of the struggle and trouble in you. And yet it is all a misunderstanding — for if the outer gave way entirely to the inner Yogi, he would find that what he lost or thought he was losing would be repaid a hundredfold — though he would get it in another spirit and consciousness, not any longer the transient and deceptive delight of the world for its own sake, but the delight of the Divine in the world a thousand times more intense, sweet and desirable."

I quote the above to underline the difficulty he experienced to persuade us to open ourselves to his wisdom and, incidentally, to stress his inexhaustible patience in dealing with the likes of us. For instance he would, tirelessly, go on arguing with me again and again whenever I would lament that I did not find anything in myself which might justify his high hopes of me as

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a prospective Yogi. Nay, he would even come down to my level to convince my scepticism and, sometimes with the driest of intellectual arguments, he would outmanoeuvre me with my own weapons.

It was because he allowed us such liberties that we could go on treating him almost as our equal in stature — so much so that Nirod (who later became one of his personal attendants) often ran full tilt into him whenever his daemon impelled him. I will give here just one or two examples.

"0 Guru", he once wrote in 1935, "I observe that whenever I communicate an experience to you, the next moment it stops. I hope the Guru is not responsible for this?"

"Well," Gurudev wrote back, "that is a thing we used often to note when the sadhana was in the early stages, namely, to speak of something experienced was to stop it. It is the reason why many Yogis make it a rule never to speak of their experiences. But latterly it had altogether ceased to be like that. So why are you starting that curious stunt all over again?"

But Nirod was nothing if not dauntless.

"I recall an incident of my childhood days", he wrote back. "I was dining with my father when I was called out. 'Papa', I said to him warningly, 'take care, you mustn't eat my fish.' Well, fathers may not, but Gurus?"

"No, Sir," Gurudev retorted, "I don't eat your fish. I have oceans of fish at my disposal and have no need to consume your little sprats. It is Messrs. Hostile Forces who do that — the dasyus, robbers."

He was always like that — had never any weakness for lording it over the weak whom he actually invited to "discuss things" familiarly with him. And he did it so unostentatiously that we often forgot how ill-equipped we were when we presumed to break a lance with him almost as though he had as much to learn from us, garrulous dwarfs, as we from him, the reticent giant! I well remember how I used to dash off just what came to me — on the most diverse topics imaginable — only to receive his comments the next morning, little realising that it cost him

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what he valued even more than his health and well-being, to wit, time, his time! But as it is little use being wise after the event, I will give a few typical instances to bring into relief the greatness of his condescension against the background of our thoughtless levity.

No, I must use the mot juste for the world condescension will not do when what floats before my mind is his compassion, for nothing less could possibly make us stake our all for one who, to all outward seeming, lived remote — almost in a far cloudland of unreality so far as we were concerned — and yet could inspire us with a deep sense of progressive fulfilment. I recall an Urdu ghazal which I once translated and often sang to describe this:

Thou wok'st my heart to thy memory

And mad'st the world parched, pale as sand:

How shall I sing thy diamond gifts

Or Limn thy Bounty's wonderland? My prayer was given before I prayed:

The jewels of thy skies were mine. The past became a scroll on waves

Beneath thy newlit summit-sign, From me, who had no claim for meed,

Never would thy Grace one boon withhold:

Who but thy self could answer earth

With squanderings of the heavenly gold?

To those who did not know him, all this may sound like an overstatement since it was not given to us to come in contact with him in a give-and-take of what we call friendship. But those who came to know him could only wonder how he moved people thus to their depths — he who (to exploit a Bengali idiom) was known as a "denizen of the deeps"; whom none had seen affected by even the most terrible of shocks, the fearless revolutionary who meditated calmly in a prison-cell when the hangman's rope was in the offing; who, a week before he passed

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away, had smiled affectionately when an attendant, a disciple wanted to call in a doctor.

"Where did you go, Nirod?" he asked when the other returned.

'To fetch the doctor," he answered apologetically.

"Doctor? What for? Have you lost your head?"

Yes, such was he: moving through life even as a "squanderer of the heavenly gold," but never asking anything from anybody in any shape or form.

Once, when an offer came from Sir Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan that he would introduce him to the West if he wrote a philosophical article for the Westerners, he declined.

"Look here!" he wrote back to me. "Do these people expect me to turn myself again into a machine for producing articles? The times of the Bande Mataram and Arya are over, thank God! I have now only the Ashram correspondence and that is 'overwhelming' enough in all conscience without starting philosophy for standard books and the rest of it.

"And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher — although I have written philosophy, which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondicherry — I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher! How I managed to do it and why? First, because Paul Richard proposed to me to co-operate in a philosophical review — and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his head to anything, I could not very well refuse: and then he had to go to war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self! Secondly, because I had only to write down in the terms of intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there, automatically. But that is not being a philosopher!

"I don't know how to excuse myself to Radhakrishanan — for I can't say all that to him. Perhaps you can find a formula for me? Perhaps: 'so occupied, not a moment for any other work, can't undertake because he might not be able to carry out his promise,'

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What do you say?"

I wrote what I could to Sir Sarvapalli but he importuned. So again I wrote to Gurudev imploring him that he comply. In the end I even tried to coax him:

"Your name, Sir, is not yet known to the West and Radhakrishnan will give you wide publicity, fancy that! Besides, he is right and rational... etc."

But he was adamant and wrote back:

"As to Radhakrishnan, I do not care whether he is right or wrong in his eagerness to get the contribution from me. But the first fact is that it is quite impossible for me to write philosophy to order. If something comes to me of itself, I can write, if I have time. But I have no time. I had some thought of writing to Adhar Das pointing out that he was mistaken in his criticism of my ideas about consciousness and intuition and developing briefly what were my real views about these things. But I have never been able to do it. I might as well think of putting the moon under my arm, Hanuman-like — although in his case it was the and going for a walk. The moon is not available and the sun — and and going for a walk. The moon is not available and the walk is not possible. It would be the same if I promised anything to Radhakrishnan — it would not be done, and that would be much worse than a refusal.

"And the second fact is that I do not care a button about having my name in any blessed place. I was never ardent about fame even in my political days; I preferred to remain behind the curtain, push people without their knowing it and get things done. It was the confounded British Government" that spoiled my game by prosecuting me and forcing me to be publicly known as a 'leader'. Then again I don't believe in advertisement except for books, and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is poison. It means either a stunt or a boom, and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crests and leave it lifeless and broken, high and dry on the shores of nowhere — or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means

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that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the 'religions' and is the reason of their failure. If I tolerated a little writing about myself, it is only to have a sufficient counter-weight in that amorphous chaos, the public mind, to balance the hostility that is always aroused by the presence of a new dynamic Truth in this world of ignorance. But the utility ends there and too much advertisement would defeat the object. I am perfectly 'rational', I assure you, in my methods and I do not proceed merely on my personal dislike of fame. If and in so far as publicity serves the Truth, I am quite ready to tolerate it; but I do not find publicity for its own sake desirable."

And yet he went on writing reams and reams of letters to such as we — for hours on end for years and years!

Yes, to our reason he was baffling, although he claimed that he was "perfectly rational." But I find it difficult to take him at his word because I have not yet been able to find a clue to the mystery of his strange personality which not only drew us to him but made us cleave to his all but invisible self in spite of the hypnotic pull of multitudinous life outside. But to give a few more instances of how subtly he led us on to "discuss" things with him and in what a carefree way!

"O Guru," I wrote, "I enclose a fine poem of Nishikanta's entitled, The Yawning West. Incidentally, I was telling him yesterday about Europe's frantic drive for the charnel-house in a fit of 'rationalised lunacy', as Russell puts it in his latest book, In Praise of Idleness. There he laments the imminent devastation of the coming War with the consequent holocaust of the finest ideals cherished by a handful of dreamers. Let me quote to you a few passages from his book which I wish my activist friend X would ponder a little.

"After castigating 'compulsory military service, boy scouts, the dissemination of political passion by the Press', etc. Russell girds at the blind restlessness of pugnacious activism thus:

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'We are all more aware of our fellow-citizens than we used to be, more anxious, if we are virtuous, to do them good, and in any case to make them do us good. We do not like to think of anyone lazily enjoying life, however refined may be the quality of his enjoyment. We feel that everybody ought to be doing some thing to help on the great cause — whatever it may be — the more so as so many bad men are working against it and ought to be stopped. We have not the leisure of mind, therefore, to quire any knowledge except such as will help us fight for what ever it may happen to be that we think important.'

"O Guru, what, I wonder, will be X's rejoinder to this sarcasm of Russell directed against his darling activism which, thanks to its blindness wedded to greedy self-aggrandisement, is today crushing out our delicate soul-aspirations for all that is noble and beautiful in life?..."

"But Dilip," he wrote back promptly, "you forget that X is a politician and the rationality of politicians has, perforce, to move within limits: if they were to allow themselves to be as clear minded as Russell, their occupation would be gone! It is not everybody who can be as cynical as a Birkenhead or as philosophical as a C. R. Das and go on with political reason political make-believe in spite of knowing what it all came to, from arrivisme in the one and patriotism in the other case."

"But no, Guru," I protested, "I have not forgotten it any more than I have forgotten the blazing fact that any show of busy enthusiasm is applauded in this gullible age as the worthiest exploitation of our vitality which makes puppets of us all, mostly with the pathetic delusion that we are serving humanity! What I was regretting was X's penchant for activism for its own sake, to undertake a mountain of labour to produce a mouse, believing, alas, (to quote your own remark on him) that 'by human intellect and energy making always a new rush, everything can be put right.' I wish my friend would try to develop a little more sober vision if only to be delivered from this sad delusion that by blind energy and rudimentary logic one could salve the shipwreck of civilisation. The stalwarts of the West have tried that

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game for centuries and the result has been — but why not hear Russell in his own words? —

'When the indemnities were imposed, the Allies regarded themselves as consumers; they considered that it would be pleasant to have the Germans work for them as temporary slaves, and to be able themselves to consume, without labour, what the Germans had produced. Then, after the treaty of Versailles had been concluded, they suddenly remembered that they were also producers, and the influx of German goods which they had been demanding would ruin their industries. They were so puzzled that they started scratching their heads, but that did no good, even when they all did it together and called it an International Conference. The plain fact is that the governing classes of the world are too ignorant and stupid to think through such a problem and too conceited to ask the advice of those who might help them'.

"O Guru, how I wish X would not attach much value to Reason's inordinate pretentions which often make people so blind to stark reality such as this!

Qu'en elites vous?"

"You are right, Dilip," he wrote back. "Only you again seem to forget that human reason is a very convenient and accommodating instrument and works only in circles set for it by interest, partiality and prejudice. The politicians reason wrongly or insincerely and have power to enforce the results of their reasoning so as to make a mess of the world's affairs: the intellectuals reason and show what their minds show them, which is far from being always the truth, for it is generally decided by intellectual preference and the mind's inborn or education-inculcated angle of vision, — but even if they see the Truth, they have no power to enforce it. So between blind power and seeing impotence the world moves, achieving destiny through a mental muddle."

I adduced, in reply, Russell's fling at national planning: "When a nation, instead of an individual, is seized by lunacy, it is thought to be displaying remarkable industrial wisdom!"

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"Seized by lunacy?" Gurudev commented: "Well, this implies that the nation is ordinarily led by reason. But is it? Or even by common sense? Masses of men act upon their vital push, not according to reason: individuals too do the same. If they call in reason, it is as a lawyer to plead the vital's cause."

I have quoted in full his letters on Russell for another reason which I may as well state here.

During the first few years of my Ashram life I simply did not know what to do with my Russellian scepticism in face of Gurudev's deep disapproval of the fool's obstinate recalcitrance to spiritual experience. But this landed me in another dilemma: on the one hand, I could not discard Russell whose intellectual clarity, sincerity and probity I profoundly admired: on the other, even when I could not fully understand Gurudev's deeper wisdom and wider vision, I could not help but warm up to his exhortations. Unfortunately, however, the see-saw did not cease; for although there was not a vestige of doubt in my mind as to who should be followed, theoretically, it so happened that despite Gurudev's unanswerable arguments I found myself unable, in practice, to accept, once for all, that Russell had better be discredited as a guide to wisdom in general. This vacillation in its turn, was sharply criticised by Krishnaprem to whom, alas, I turned, foolishly, for sympathy. For on this issue he evinced a heart of adamant and stormed at me from distant Almora:

"Why do you keep harping on Russell? I quite agree he is a fine man in many ways and a fine thinker of his own sort, but why do you keep hoping that your Gurudev or someone else will answer his sceptical arguments? If you accept Russell's premisses you will be forced into his conclusions but then why accept his premisses? He is no muddle-headed thinker whose conclusions are at fault with his premisses. Quite the reverse. If you set foot on an escalator you will be automatically carried to the top of it; so why set foot on it at all when you see it going in the wrong direction?"

But there, precisely, lay the greatness of Gurudev's character. He never minded if any of us wanted to experiment with an

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escalator "going in the wrong direction." For he had never believed in hard and fast taboos. His tolerance and charity would have been incredible had it not been a fact of everyday experience. In the Ashram he tolerated a number of disgruntled fire- eaters who called themselves his disciples and went on giving a long rope even to some insolent rebels who, from calling him names and misrepresenting his catholic views, told deliberate lies — just to do him down. Even such calumniators and traitors he not only declined to expel from the Ashram but actually forgave again and again till I had to ask him which he loved more: to encourage the faithless or discourage the faithful?

As I look back in retrospect, somewhat sadly, I realise how often I myself have misunderstood him in the past. Perhaps I had to — his patience, charity and tolerance having been a little too incredible even for human credulity. For I did, often enough, feel impatient of his superhuman patience when some others took advantage of it. At such times, I conveniently forgot how much I myself had profited by his patient acceptance of the burden of my obstinate ego and assertive self-importance. How often, indeed, had I rebelled, yet not once did he scold me — not even when in my rebellious moods. I doubted his love and wisdom! Time and again, when I wrote to him that I had decided to leave the Ashram for good, he came to me with the balm of his affection, understanding and infinite tolerance not only forgiving the bravado of my repeated ultimatums but assuring me again and again:

"You need not imagine that we shall ever lose patience or give you up — that will never happen. Our patience, you will find, is tireless because it is based upon unbounded sympathy and love. Human love may give up, but divine love is stable and does not falter. We know that the aspiration of your psychic being is sincere. It is because the sincere aspiration is there that we have no right to disbelieve in your adhikara for the Yoga.

"These difficulties do not last for ever — they exhaust themselves and disappear. But to reject them when they come is the quickest way to get rid of them for ever."

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Nevertheless I could not, for the life of me, reject out of hand me hostile suggestion which got the better of me in my wrong moods. By way of illustration I will refer here to two of the numerous crises I had to undergo.

The first serious "attack," if I may so put it, developed in March, 1930.I had been feeling listless after the subsidence of the first flush of joy and optimism when suddenly, I made a faux pas which brought matters rapidly to a head.

It happened like this. Gandhiji's famous Dandi march had just been announced in the papers: they would break the law by making salt from sea-water and court prison. In my despair, I wrote to Gurudev that I had decided to go to prison, giving up Yoga, the more so as I could not bring myself to believe in his fantastic doctrine of the "hostile forces". I challenged him to prove his thesis and mocked at the idea of invisible phantom forces, such as he posited, swaying sensible (?) men like us. This time, I imagine, Gurudev wrote without a smile of irony.

"Dilip," he repeated, "it is certainly the force hostile to Yoga and the divine realisation upon earth that is acting upon you at the present moment. It is the force (one force and not many) which is here in the Ashram and has been going about from one to another. With some as with B, V and P, it has succeeded; others have cast it away from them. . . . Some are still struggling, but, in spite of the bitterness of the struggle, have been able to keep faithful to the divine call that brought them here.

"That it is the same hostile force would be shown, even if its presence were not for us visible and palpable, by the fact that the suggestions it makes to the minds of the victims are always the same. Its one master sign is always this impulse to get away from the Ashram, away from myself and the Mother, out of this atmosphere, and at once. For the force does not want to give time for reflection, for resistance, for the saving Power to be felt and act. Its other signs are doubt; tamasic depression; an exaggerated sense of impurity and unfitness; the idea that the Mother is remote, does not care for one, is not giving what she ought to give, is not divine, with other similar suggestions

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accompanied by an inability to feel her presence or her help; a feeling that the Yoga is not possible or is not going to be done in this life; the desire to go away and do something in the ordinary world — the thing itself suggested varying according to the personal mind. If it were not this one invariable hostile force acting, there would not be this exact similarity in all the cases. In each case it is the same obscurities thrown on the intelligence, the same subconscious movements of the vital brought to the surface, the same irrational impulses pushing to the same action: departure, renunciation of the soul-truth, refusal of the Divine Love and the Divine call.

"It is the vital crisis, the test, the ordeal for you as for others — a test and ordeal which we would willingly spare those who are with us but which they call on themselves by persistence in some wrong line of movement or some falsification of the inner attitude. If you reject entirely the falsehood that this force casts upon the sadhaka, if you remain faithful to the Light that called you here, you conquer and, even if serious difficulties still remain, the final victory is sure and the divine triumph of the soul over Ignorance and the Darkness....

"I do not wish to disguise from you the difficulty of this great and tremendous change or the possibility that you may have a long and hard work before you; but are you really unwilling to face it and take your share in the great work? Will you reject the greatness of this endeavour to follow a mad, irrational impulse towards some more exciting work of the hour or the moment for which you have no true call in any part of your nature?

"There is no true reason for despondency; in nothing that has passed in you or which you have written do I find any good ground for it. The difficulties you experience are nothing to those that others have felt and yet conquered them, others who were not stronger than you....

"All that is needed is for your psychic being to come forward and open to the direct and real constant inner contact of myself and the Mother. Hitherto your soul expressed itself through the mind and its ideals and admirations through the vital and its

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higher joys and aspirations: but that is not sufficient to conquer the physical difficulty and enlighten and transform Matter. It is your soul in itself, your psychic being, that must come in front, awake entirely and make the fundamental change. The psychic being will not need the support of the intellectual ideas or outer signs and helps. It is that alone that can give you the direct feeling of the Divine, the constant nearness, the inner support and aid. You will not then feel the Mother remote or have any further doubt about the realisation; for the mind thinks and the vital craves but the soul feels and knows the Divine."

I can still recapture the thrill the last sentence gave me and I came back to normal.

Then came another attack which was more serious — a couple of years later. The cause of it was of course my egoism and self-will, but in my ignorance, I put it down to his aloofness.

"Why must you insist on staying thus in deep purdah," I asked him rebelliously, "When we should be dying to hear just a word of reassurance direct from your lips? To succeed in any Yoga of Guruvada, the Guru must be loved, must he not? But how can one love a being who has become so remote as to taper off into all but a rumour? I have prayed to you in silence to grant me an interview; if you had really been omniscient as many here stoutly claim, you would have heard my anguished prayer since I came to you not because of any frustration (I threw away my career in the full flush of an assured success) but because of my need for the Divine. And yet you rest in repose, sequestered in your ivory-tower of God-knows-what consciousness and look calmly on while we sink in this relentless slough of despond!

"But although I am determined to end such a sterile relationship which can be of little use to you and a source of pointless suffering to me, I cannot bring myself to depart unless you consent to dismiss me with your blessings. For strange as it may sound to you, I cannot do without your blessings even when I decline to go on with your impossible Yoga."

To that came a rejoinder which he alone could give in reply to such arrant nonsense.

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"It is quite impossible for me to dismiss you or consent to your going away like this from us. If the idea of this kind of separation is possible to you, for us it is inconceivable that our close relation should end like this. I had thought that the love and affection the Mother and I bear you had been made evident by us. But if you say that you cannot believe in it or accept it with the limitations on its outward manifestation that not our choice but inexorable necessity imposes on us for a time, I do not know how to convince you. I could not believe that you would find it in your heart to go or take such a step when it came to the point. As it is, I can only appeal to you not to allow yourself to be swept away by this attack, to remain faithful even in suffering to your soul that brought you here and to believe in our love that can never waver...."

I could not "disbelieve" in spite of my "determination" and wrote to him that I lacked the strength to wrench myself free from such a clasp. But then a contrary thing happened just when I was regaining my equilibrium, and I stumbled once again: I was told by a friend, who also happened to be in the grip of a similar depression, that both Mother and Sri Aurobindo had given almost identical assurances to more than one "previous failures". Instantly my heart misgave me once more and I wrote asking him whether he could not possibly have made a mistake in choosing me — was he sure that I was not going to prove, like some of my predecessors, a spectacular failure?

To that he replied: "Do not believe all you hear. . . . You do not belong to yourself... I have cherished you like a friend and a son and have poured on you my force to develop your powers — to make an equal development in the Yoga. We claim the right to keep you as our own here with us."

As I look back somewhat nostalgically, on those dear days when I used to receive such lovely letters at least thrice or four times a week, a very significant fact emerges of which I failed to take full cognisance at the time, to wit, that although he insisted on my receiving at his hands what he called divine love, it was always his human way of offering it that prevailed in the

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end and induced me to comply with his invitation to attempt what seemed to me all but impossible: the radical change of human nature and its reactions. Otherwise I should have given up long ago. What I mean by this is not easy to put in words, for often, when I try to portray what I felt then, I find that I tend to sound dramatic if not theatrical. It may be that I was somewhat dramatic at the time, unconsciously. Nevertheless I can only vouch for what I believe to be true: that even when all such histrionic impulses are discounted, something very beautiful crystallised out of every such psychological crisis, something that I would like to call the human element which crept in, often enough imperceptibly, in his self expression and, like a leaven, transformed my deepening psychic gloom into joy. I do not know if my emphasis is convincing even now, but the experience was vivid enough: that had he chosen to rule out the human way of arguing and coaxing the faithless recalcitrant in me, all his divine powers in full display would have been unequal to the task of bringing me out of the wood every time, giving my dwindling hope a new fillip or, shall I say, a new lease of life.

In annotation, I may quote here an extract from a letter I wrote to him, half in jest to conceal my deep penitence.

"You have told us, Guru," so I wrote, "that every sadhaka here represents a type and serves a Divine purpose in not only getting something from you but evoking something in you on the rebound. I have often wondered what purpose was served by my irruption here till the answer flashed, apocalyptically: I was sent here by the Divine to test your patience in a way none else possibly could: to bring out, that is, the difference between the human patience and the divine.

"But," I went on to add, "you have at least one advantage to which we, your assayers, cannot arrogate: your divinity. No wonder you can be so patient with us since it is after all we who suffer, not you.

That is why, I suppose, you look so august when we see your face, au dessus de la melee, and therefore unperturbed, buttressed probably by the Supramental! Inevitably, equipped as

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you are with a temperament such as yours — so aloof from what Russell loves to call the 'hard world of fact'!" To that he promptly replied:

"But what strange ideas again! — that I was born with a Supramental temperament and that I know nothing of hard realities! Good God! My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities — from hardships, starvation in England and constant dangers and fierce difficulties to the far greater difficulties constantly cropping up here in Pondicherry, external and internal. My life has been a battle; the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference to its character. But of course as we have not been shouting these things, it is natural, I suppose, for others to think that I am living in an august, glamorous, lotus-eating dreamland where no hard facts of life or nature present themselves. But what an illusion all the same!"

"But is it altogether an illusion. Guru?" I pursued unconsoled. "You yourself have said in one of your famous messages which we, humans, have been exhorted to believe. It assures us: 'The Divine gives himself to those who give themselves without reserve in all their parts to the Divine. For them the calm, the light, the power, the bliss, the freedom, the wideness, the heights of knowledge, the seas of ananda!' Now, I submit, if you wanted us to take all this not as mere rhetoric but as a concrete fact of indubitable experience, then it must follow that none would be able to take seriously your trials and tribulations, far less presume to feel any commiseration for you. For how could we feel a pang for you when you yourself assure us of this in exhaustible capital to your everlasting credit waiting to indemnify you against any loss past, present or future? And then, since you are in constant communication with this obliging Divine of yours what have you really to long, suffer or sigh for? I have your letters telling me, first that, you had 'even initial realisations while pondering verses of the Upanishada or the Gita', and secondly that, 'in my case I walked into nirvana without intending it or rather nirvana walked casually into me not so far from the

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beginning of my Yogic career without asking my leave'. Good Lord! How can such a giant possibly imagine the stuff we, dwarfs are made of? An Avatar like you or even a mighty Vibhuti* has only to apprise Him, your Omnipotent Commissariat, and He will give you with both (or shall I say, endless) hands all you need? For you and He being one. He cannot possibly refuse you what you ask any more than the hand can the mouth when the coveted food is handy."

His reply came: "Your descriptions of Avatars and prophets are magnificent in colour. I wish it were a sober fact that the Divine refuses us nothing — if He would start doing that, it would be glorious and I should not at all insist on constant beatitude. But from his representatives, Vibhutis, and Avatars, he exacts a good deal and expects them to overcome rather difficult conditions. No doubt they do not call for compassion, but, well, surely you can permit them an occasional divine right to a grumble?"

"Well Guru," I wrote back in a more conciliatory tone this time, "you can grumble on if it helps you overcome whatever difficulties confront you. But, at all events, do realise for mercy's sake, that we cannot, even if we grumble away in full chorus and for all our worth, overcome such a difficulty as your smilelessness, not to mention any others. And now on top of it all you foist this stupendous Divine of yours on the fragile altars of our hearts, an Idol whose weight makes even you grumble. What hope is there then for the likes of us?"

To that he replied: "The Divine may be difficult, but His difficulties can be overcome if one keeps at Him. Even my smilelessness was overcome, which Nevinson had remarked with horror more than twenty years before — 'the most dangerous man in India, Aurobindo Ghosh who never smiles'. He ought to have added: 'but who always jokes' — but he did not know that as I was very solemn with him, or perhaps I had not evolved sufficiently on that side then. Anyhow since you have overcome

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* Vide Glossary.

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that — my smilelessness — you are bound to overcome all the other difficulties also."

Henri W. Nevinson, the well-known author, came to India in 1907 as a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian and his book entitled The New Spirit in India published in 1908 made a deep impression not only on Indians but; on the British bureaucracy as well, because he was not only gifted with vision but commanded a rare power of expression which could sway people. He sought out most men who were prominent in the then public life of our country and was most impressed by Sri Aurobindo's personality. Here is what he saw and felt in Sri Aurobindo even then:

"In an age of supernatural religion Aurobindo would have become what the irreligious mean by a fanatic. He was possessed by that concentrated vision, the limited and absorbing devotion. Like a horse in blinkers he ran straight, regardless of everything except the narrow bit of road in front. But at the end of that road he saw a vision more inspiring and spiritual than any fanatic saw who rushed on death with Paradise in sight. Nationalism to him was surrounded by a mist of glory, the halo that medieval saints beheld gleaming around the head of martyrs. Grave with intensity, careless of fates or opinion, and one of the most silent men I have known, he was of the stuff that dreamers are made of, but dreamers who will act their dreams, indifferent to the means. 'Nationalism', he said in a brief address delivered in Bombay, early in 1908, 'is a religion that comes from God'.

One of the reasons why I quote at some length this passage is that I know it for a fact that many an admirer of his, somewhat overawed by this intense gravity, opined that though he was assuredly "the greatest intellectual of our age",* his penchant for knowledge had made it impossible to approve fully of love

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*The quotation is from a sentence Dr. Sarvepallii Radhakrishnan wrote in his tribute after the passing of Sri Aurobindo (quoted in The White Umbrella University of California Press by Professor Mackenzie Brown, p. 126.)

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which revelled in emotion. Once, when a grave friend of mine voiced this judgment, I was a trifle scared. So, I wrote to him a long letter in which among other things I asked (2.2.1932): "0 Guru, I have always been fond of bhakti and love and emotion and so I feel frightened when I hear such grave opinions from highly worthy and sombre pundits. So please clarify and oblige." He answered at once (3.2.1932): "It is a misunderstanding to suppose that I am against bhakti or emotional bhakti — which comes to the same thing, since without emotion there can be no bhakti. It is rather the fact that in my writings on Yoga I have given bhakti the highest place. All that I have said at any time which could account for this misunderstanding was against an unpurified emotionalism which leads to want of balance. . . . But the insistence on purification does not mean that I condemn true feeling or emotion. ... On the contrary, the deeper the emotion, the more intense the bhakti, the greater is the force for realisation and transformation. It is oftenest through intensity of emotion that the psychic being awakes and there is an opening of the inner doors to the Divine."

And it is perfectly true that in his writing he has given the highest place to bhakti. To quote just two passages. In his masterly chapter entitled. Mystery of Love (Synthesis Of Yoga) he writes: "Love and Ananda are the last word of being, the secret of secrets, the mystery of mysteries. . . . There is nothing which is beyond the reach of the God-lover or denied to him; for he is the favourite of the Divine Lover and the self of the Beloved."

Also in his marvellous poem. God, he writes in the first verse:

Thou who pervadest all the worlds below Yet sitst above,

Master of all who work and rule and know, Servant of love.

Reminding one of the Bhagavat's famous confession of Lord Narayan to the sage, Durvasha: "Aham bhakta-paradhino hyaswatantra iva dwija" which means "I am not independent, but depend utterly on my devotees." And it was because the Love that flowered in him through

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years of one-pointed concentration on the Divine as Krishna* had shed all its human dross that he could write to me in another intimate letter:

"It is only the divine love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of darkness towards the Divine. The Galileo-like Je-m'en-fiche-ism^± would not carry me one step: it would certainly not be divine. It is quite another thing that enables me to walk, unweeping, and lamenting towards the goal."

But strange as it may sound to many who are willing to take him as an embodiment of the Divine, that is, something beyond the ambit of human comprehension, the very assumption that he was divine, even when we could not define 'divinity' (except in that we could not claim him as one of us) made us fret and fume to the top of our bent. And from his watch-tower of summit-vision he must have seen that clearly, for has he not written, apropos, that mortality finds the unmitigated Divine so hard to bear that it is actually impelled to reject its boons of immortality?—

It murmurs at its sorrowless happiness...

Inflicting on the heights the abysm's law

It sullies with its mire heaven's messengers

It meets the sons of God with death and pain.

And it was not a mere regret he had vented but a deep tragedy for these "sons of God" that it had to be, down the ages,

"The cross their payment for the crown they gave."

In the Ashram most of us gave ample proof of being to some extent responsible for this grievous state of things insomuch that it weighed on our minds all the time, and yet we saw no

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*He wrote to me (25.2.45) that his realised identity with Krishna was not "something philosophical or mental but a matter of daily and hourly realisation."

^± I do not care.

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way out, naturally, being not only sceptical about the possibility of the divinisation of the human proclivities in us, but actually hostile to it in practice, if not in theory, a fact which probably made him sigh in Savitri, VI, II

"A dark concealed hostility is lodged

In the human depths, in the hidden heart of Time

That claims the right to change and mar God's work."

And that is why the reign of human suffering on earth cannot be put an end to immediately. No wonder —

"Hard is the world-redeemer's heavy task;

The world itself becomes his adversary,

His enemies are the beings he came to save.

The world is in love with its own ignorance."

Yes, he had, indeed, his work cut out and he knew it. Years ago he wrote to me that he had been dredging, dredging, dredging, the mire of the subconscious", and he hinted at the same resistance in a letter to Nirod: "It (the Supramental Light) was coming down before November, 1934, but afterwards all the mud arose and it stopped. But there are red crimson lights. One is Supramental Divine Love, the other Supramental Physical Force." Somewhat at sea, I asked him what was his drift. He sent me only four lines of an unpublished poem by way of explanation which I quoted subsequently in my Among the Great:

He who would bring the heavens here

Must descend himself into clay And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way*

But to revert to the human. For I do not want to convey the impression that although we were often enough conscious of our deep limitations, we were always unhappy on that account or that Gurudev wanted us to go on our way brooding profitlessly

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* Published subsequently in his poem, "A God's Labour".

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about our shortcomings and lapses. Did he not once write to me that he had all along wanted me to follow the sunlit path? But even such a beneficent counsel put me in a wry mood, and I wrote to him asking him whether "this beautiful sunlit path" could be open to such as we? Anyhow, I persevered in reminding him of his dark hints in the past that his Integral Yoga bristled with difficulties. Had he not also written in an oft-quoted letter of his: "I call no one in the world, nor am I here to convert anybody" etc.? In the end I wrote: "Such being your published views, why do you object to the path of vairagya which I propose to take especially when I feel deeply discouraged by all sorts of adverse suggestions?"

To this he replied, once again, with his characteristic understanding and solicitude:

"It is evident that something in you, continuing the unfinished curve of a past life, is pushing you on the path of vairagya and the stormy way of bhakti — in spite of our preference for a less painful one — something that is determined to be drastic with the outer nature so as to make itself free to fulfil its secret aspiration. But do not listen to these suggestions of the voice that says: 'You shall not succeed and it is no use trying'. That is a thing that need never be said in the Way of the Spirit, however difficult it may seem at the moment to be. Keep through all the aspirations which you express so beautifully in your poems; for it is certainly there and comes out from the depths, and if it is the cause of suffering — as great aspirations are, in the world and nature were there is so much to oppose them — it is also the promise and surety of emergence and victory in the future".

To which I replied that it was because I was a born "wonderer" that I wondered whether there really was an easier way, "the sunlit path", in this world of dominant shadows. He answered in the affirmative and wrote:

"The sunlit path can only be followed if the psychic is constantly or usually in front or if one has a natural spirit of faith' and surrender or a face habitually turned towards the sun or psychic predisposition (e.g. faith in one's destiny) or if one has

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acquired the psychic turn. That does not mean that the 'sunlit man' has no difficulties; he may have many, but he regards them cheerfully as 'all in the day's work'; but if he gets a bad beating, he is capable of saying: 'Well, that was a queer go, but the Divine is evidently in a queer mood and if that is His way of doing things, it must be the right one; I am surely a still queerer fellow myself and that, I suppose, was the only means of putting me right'. But everybody can't be of that turn, and surrender which would put everything right is, as you say, difficult to achieve completely. That is why we do not insist on total surrender at once, but are satisfied with a little to begin with, the rest is to grow as it can."

But do what we would, we simply could not keep our faces "turned towards the sun", feeling sometimes too deeply discouraged by the darkness that deepened before us as we trudged on. But although it was true that the more we tried to follow the easier sunlit path, the more we found it difficult to cleave to the right attitude, yet it would be untrue to say that the struggle brought us nothing but pain. It taught us invaluable lessons; unmasked little by little the subtlest tricks of the ego; gave us joy whenever we fought its suggestions down and often enough got our self-will to bow progressively to the Guru's will or our pride to chase the false preconceived notions so that the true notions might have some niches to settle in like the white doves of purity. And last, though not least, there was the thrill, day after day, of receiving his letters — on art and science, religion and politics, philosophy and literature, the way of all flesh and the ascent to God's Grace redeeming flesh . . . was there any theme he could not write about and improvise on in a vein at once rapturous and incredible! And, to think that he should have gone on writing about all this to such as we, poor elfs, who constantly "turned upon his saviour hand of Grace", to put it in his own words!

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